Arabic is one of the widely spoken languages in Israel, chiefly among the minority Israeli Arab population. For a predominant section of the Israeli Arabs, Arabic is the mother tongue and is the language of communication and education. They also identify Arabic as their national language, and interspersed with the conflictual dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians, Arabic acquires political and emotive manifestations. Hence, Arabic also forms an essential component of Israeli Arab identity. The attitude of the Israeli state, its majority Jewish population, security establishment, and the legal status of Arabic have evolved, and the negative attitude among the Jewish population about Arabic has hardened with the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arabic was a de jure official language from 1948 until 2018 when the Nation-State Law repealed it; at the de facto level, Arabic remained a marginalized language or a language of the Palestinian “other” and the Arab “enemy.” This determined the fate of Arabic in the official Israeli language policy, with the state identifying Arabic as the language of the Arab minority, allowing it to preserve the language without jeopardizing the primacy of Hebrew. Despite the change in the legal status of Arabic in 2018, the political status, pedagogical patterns, and societal attitudes toward it have remained relatively unchanged.